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The PRISMA Lab was established in 1994, thanks to the financial support of the University of Naples for the site and of the National Research Council (CNR) and the Ministry of Education University and Research (MIUR) for the equipment. The laboratory was conceived to provide experimental support to the educational activities of the curriculum in control systems engineering as well as a set of testbeds for "Laurea'' and Research Doctorate thesis projects. Major set-ups include a cooperative robot manipulator system, a direct-drive planar arm and PLC-based process control.
The cooperative robot manipulator system set-up is the main project in the lab, and is constituted by two 6-axis Comau SMART-3 S industrial robots. The set-up allows performing experiments of single robot control as well as of coordinated control of the dual-robot system. Each robot manipulator has a serial kinematic structure with six revolute joints. The axes of the outer three joints intersect two-by-two making a non-spherical wrist. The manipulator on the right is mounted on a sliding track which provides redundancy with respect to six-degree-of-freedom end-effector tasks. Joint axes are actuated by brushless motors via gear trains, and the motors are equipped with absolute resolvers. Each robot is endowed with the C3G-9000 native controller, a VME-based architecture with 2 processing boards (Robot CPU and Servo CPU) both based on a Motorola 68020/68882, where the latter has an additional DSP and is in charge of trajectory generation, inverse kinematics and joint position servo control. An open version of the control architecture is available thanks to use of Bit 3 Computer bus adapter boards connecting the VME bus to the ISA bus of a PC, where the PC and C3G controllers communicate via the shared memory available in the Robot CPU. Time synchronization is implemented by interrupt signals from the C3G to the PC with data exchange every 1 ms. A set of C routines are available to drive the bus adapter boards in a Linux RT environment. Several grippers can be connected to the manipulators' wrists through 6-axis ATI F/T 130/10 force/torque sensors in order to perform experiments of force-motion control on the single robot as well as on the dual-robot system. Further, a visual system is available consisting of two SONY XC 8500 CE analog cameras with MATROX Genesis framegrabbers.
The second set-up is the Direct Drive Manipulator Package by IMI which includes a 2-axis planar arm actuated by NSK Megatorque Motors, a controller station based on a PC with a DSP board, and development software. User interfacing, inverse kinematics and trajectory generation are executed on the PC, while servo control is run on the DSP board.
The last set-up is comprised of 12 stations based on Allen-Bradley PLC-5 systems which can be connected to PC's by a Data Highway+ network. Software packages are available for real-time simulation of automated plants (HEI Automation Master), as well as simulation (SPEX), design (CADEPA) and supervision (RSVIEW) of PLC systems.
All the research activities of the Robotics and Automation Group are supported by experimental testing, including:
Contacts
Tel: +39 081 76-83875
Fax: +39 081 76-83816